


Sea's Fire Falls

by nimblermortal



Category: Norse Religion & Lore
Genre: F/M, Gen, Loki Does What He Wants, Loki Has Issues, Sif Does What She Wants, unapologetic Loki
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-16 22:55:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2287508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki has a plan to cut Sif's hair.</p>
<p>Warning for gratuitous mentions of Norse poetic devices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sea's Fire Falls

The scissors were the problem.

Loki had thought long and hard about this before he made his first move. Knives, yes, knives were easy, everyone carried a knife and she would hardly be surprised to take one or eleven off of him, but if he wanted to accomplish the whole task without waking Sif up, he didn’t stand half a chance with a knife. He might smuggle a scalpel in the same way, and it was simplicity itself to fashion a sheath for a razor so that it looked like the hilt of a dagger. There was no disguising scissors.

And what if her hair were coarse? What if the scissors didn’t do? If she were a light sleeper, he would only get one chance at this. Shears, he needed shears, but there was no chance that he would be able to smuggle shears in on his person, and the chances of convincing someone to smuggle shears into Sif’s chamber were slim, nonexistent if he wanted a hint of deniability after the deed was done.

If he used small scissors he could stick them in his own hair as a decoration, but they might not be powerful enough for the task at hand. He would not be able to accomplish the same thing with large scissors unless he cut the handles off, in which case they would be impossible to maneuver.

Finally he gave up and cast his bird-killing stone at the problem. When the day came, carefully prepared, he reached down and snapped a button off his own coat, then sidled sidewise to Sif.

“Lady,” he breathed into her ear, and watched her stiffen. That was satisfying, almost as fulfilling as watching her relax as she realized who it was. Yes, he had prepared well for this. Loki may be the unappetizing, weakling runt of Asgard, but he had a a silver, gilded tongue, and she was not the first to fall for it. “I wondered if you might assist me with a small but embarrassing problem.”

“Half of Asgard knows the size of your problem, Laufeysson,” Sif growled, her voice not nearly matching the lovely aura of her famous hair, the tresses everyone said were fine as captured sunlight.

“Lady, you underestimate me,” he said, slipping onto the bench next to her. He held out his hand with the button inside it. “I was merely wondering if I might have the loan of a needle and thread from you.”

“You shan’t have the loan of anything from me, falcon-boy, until -“

“Oh, I’ll take more time than a falcon,” Loki said, “but if I may not borrow your needle, seamstress, it seems I’ll have to take you in your entirety.” He slid his foot against hers and, before she could protest, slipped a whole quail’s egg into his mouth and smiled at her. “It’s more proper your way. I’d no sooner be seen with needle and seidr than your husband will see sunlight before morning.”

Sif turned automatically to see Thor, her hair bright as sea’s fire. Loki caught himself raising a hand to feel the strands - and permitted it of himself. The braids wrapped gently around his wrist like his son’s coils. Sif looked back at him, irritated.

“And the sun rises,” he said before she could speak.

“What,” said Sif, who was well accustomed to having her head complimented as an image of the sun.

“You turn,” Loki explained, “and the sun rises, for you are there. The sky,” he gestured vaguely at her face, the clothes and gems her husband had given her, “is fair enough, but only because every atom of its being reflects its central glory.”

“Liar,” said Sif, and Loki shrugged.

“At least when I lie, I believe it,” he said. He saw Sif’s eyes flick sideways again to her prostrate husband and knew she was wondering just what it took for all of Asgard to know him as… everyone said they did. “Lady, I ask only a moment of your time. If you cannot give it, I will go to Freyja.”

“No,” Sif snapped. “It is a silly thing. Come with me, we’ll have it fixed in a moment.”

“The whole of it,” Loki murmured, and stood to follow. “You are a godsend, lady.”

He told her many other things as he walked her home. He’d said no more than half of them before; it was hardly fun to enchant a new lady with the same old words, but it gave him a feel of what was to come in the way her muscles moved in response to the shifting patterns of a well-turned dróttkvætt.

She was honest enough to pull the scissors from her basket when she got to her room, and she turned to hand them to him even as he slid up against her.

“Brazen -“ she began, but Loki was already humming Odin’s mead into the soft skin where her hair turned around her ear, twisting the rhythm of dróttkvætt into the beat of a taglog and feeling her heart stutter along with him under his hand.

“You should know,” she said, for her own benefit, “that I know full well you are up to no good, and I am choosing to do this because I think it is worth it.”

He smiled against her lips as she sank onto the bed and guided her hand to set the scissors aside. “Well then,” he said to her cheek, while thinking _You sound like your husband,_ “I will have to make sure it is.” He was not so dishonest after all; he would leave her with something at the end of things, if it was only the turn of a phrase.

He steered clear of refhvorf. He would leave the fox-turns for after. He told her hryniandi as he trickled down her breast and spilled across her stomach, swirling and surging with all the patterns of the ocean whose fire her tresses reflected, and he sang her runhendingar after they were done. He made her come once there, then again because he could. It was too bad, he thought, that she would never forgive him after this; he liked to prove he was the best. He had worked long and hard to become so, and there were things he couldn’t show her from a man’s form that would really blow her mind; but it took people a while to warm up to them and stop calling him a pervert.

So instead he lured her into the bathtub under pretext of getting her clean, and showed off a bit by seidr-heating water, and made her come again there before letting her drift to sleep in his arms, whispering refhvörfar and promises not to let her fall.

His hair, though thoroughly mussed, was still done tightly around the pair of scissors he had stabbed through the bun. When he pulled them out, his hair fell out of the seidr net to drift around him in the water, mixing with Sif’s sunlight strands. Fire and ash, he thought, never a very alluring combination, but he made do. Ash, and dark wires next to the silken threads that ran from Sif’s head. He ran his fingers across her scalp, murmuring runhendingar as he gathered the loose strands back toward her half-empty braid.

Pretext. She had thought the scissors were his only pretext. Oh, Sif, gentle Sif of the streaming hair, _everything_ about Loki was a pretext, even this moment built toward something new and different as he closed the lips of the scissors around the tail of her braid and, gentle as the lover he had just been, he squeezed. They made a slight rasping sound as the tension of her hair changed. Three more tries and the end of her braid sank beneath the water, Sif sleeping as soundly as she had before.

Oh, Sif. Trusting, careless Sif. Odin could have told her not to close both eyes while Loki was in the room - and she knew already that he did not love her as he loved Odin.

The next stage could be done with scissors too, with these or the smaller pair Loki had stabbed into his hair in case she didn’t offer him the larger ones. Loki snipped across her head, quiet and swift, uneven lengths falling to float across the surface of the water. There was no artistry in this, and it surprised Loki that this bothered him. He could leave her head as ragged as he liked and it would only further his ends - but the only artistry remaining was to cut it smooth as algae across river stones, and so he would.

When he had it short as dandelion down, he ran a hand back over her head, marveling that she still slept, that this was so easy he had not yet had to pull on the sleeping spell left in the ruins of his hair seidr. He had not been looking forward to fighting Sif’s will to cast it on her, but it seemed the sheer artistry of her husband’s snores, becoming ever more familiar to those left in Odin’s hall, was working in his favor.

The scissors came apart when he was finished, one side tucking absent-mindedly back into his own hair - and let it cut, he would hardly miss it - and the other palmed as he ran water back over Sif’s head, massaging it gently to work the soap in with the sleep spell. That done, he could start using the razor for its second purpose, drawing it back until her head was gleaming again but in quite a different way.

He admired his work in the candlelight as he went, the smooth surfaces and the hidden bumps that he would never have guessed at before. Sif, Sif, not so pretty without your tresses, he thought, and almost hummed his happiness. He shook that off by checking the candles: they would not allow him much more time. Neither could he afford to adjust his speed. He would simply have to be swifter about his exit.

He may have missed a strand or two in the end, but that was more Sif’s problem than his. She would have to cut them off herself, or the effect would be worse than the alternative. Loki’s artistry only went so far before it was countered by impatience. He combed the pieces of the hair spell together one last time to extract the levitation woven into them and sent it tumbling off the tips of his fingers so that he could slip out from under Sif. He fetched a pillow from her bed and set it under her head before he lowered the levitation to the bottom of the bathtub and slipped it out from under her to float against her neck, one extra precaution.

Then he turned, shifted, shrank, and grabbed his discarded clothes between his talons as he flew into the night on owl’s wings. She would wake the next morning surrounded by the dank puddles of her own hair and, unless she wanted to confess her infidelity to her husband, no one to blame but herself. She might blame herself anyway. And all Loki had lost out of it was the button on one of his least favorite coats.

 


End file.
